


like fragments of a dream

by junes_discotheque



Series: lead me astray [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Existential Angst, F/M, Getting Off On Existential Angst, Grief/Mourning, Light Dom/sub, Mildly Dubious Consent, Poor Life Choices, Telepathic Sex, Telepathy, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, emotional sadomasochism, italics abuse, this is kind of weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:48:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22522753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/junes_discotheque/pseuds/junes_discotheque
Summary: The Master calls her. She answers. They talk, and then they don't.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Series: lead me astray [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1600486
Comments: 11
Kudos: 137





	like fragments of a dream

**Author's Note:**

> Extremely mild spoilers for Fugitive of the Judoon

He can taste her grief.

It is ash and dust and the sticky-sweet juice of a long-extinct fruit he had, in another life, pressed into the palm of a messy-haired boy with a crooked smile and a dreamy gaze. It is ice, burning like lava down his throat, sinking into the pit of his stomach. And it is warm spring air and fresh crimson grass and the cold, musty halls of the Citadel.

She is, as ever, a sentimental fool.

The Doctor has left cracked the wall in her mind, though he can’t be sure if she meant to do it or if seeing the horror he’s made of their home has left her so shattered that her control has slipped. Either way, he thinks, as he lies back on his sofa and watches the red glow of his console flicker in patterns on the ceiling of his TARDIS, he is grateful to whatever power has granted him this glimpse.

He does regret that he did not get the chance to see her face when she looked upon the ruin of their home, or when she listened to the recording he made for her, but in a way this is almost better. The Doctor’s pain reverbs through his body. It lights up every atom. The buzz of killing, a thousandfold, going on forever.

No. _Better_ than killing.

It’s every moment he dropped his mask, and the Doctor _saw_ him, and _named_ him; it’s those long seconds of shock-horror-fear.

It’s the screams of the Gallifreyan dead, but not the ones _he_ killed. Not just, anyway.

The Master pokes, a little, at that tucked-away memory where it spills out. It gives a little subconscious flinch, and he backs away. He doesn’t want her knowing he’s here yet.

There’s so much more he wants to see, after all.

His hand drops to his lap and he closes his eyes, as he lets the sweet thrum of the Doctor’s pain sweep him away.

*

Over the next few days, the Master keeps a close watch on her. The psychic link keeps their timelines synchronous, though he’s currently a few thousand years behind her; she’s been dragging her little pets from one corner of the universe to the other at breakneck speed while he’s parked himself next to a pub in 2020 Sheffield.

(The Master knows how she gets when she’s upset. Sooner or later her pets will demand she take them home. He intends to be waiting for her when she does.)

The ice in the pit of their stomach gets heavier with each planet the Doctor visits. Runs to, really - always running, she is. 

_You can’t run from this,_ he thinks. Barely a whisper, but he can tell she hears it. 

The link doesn’t close, but she doesn’t respond, either.

By the time he feels her snap at that girl-human of hers - the pretty one with the long hair and the deep eyes - he’s realized that the grief is just a cover.

For _guilt._

And isn’t that an interesting development?

After all, it’s not _her_ that’s destroyed Gallifrey this time around. All her sins in the Time War have been scrubbed clean. But then, sentimental, self-sacrificing, _noble_ fool that she is. She just can’t help herself.

The Doctor has to take the credit for _his_ work. As if all his deeds are her responsibility, when the blood of Gallifrey is on his hands and his alone, and he’s glad for it.

_They deserved what they got._

He tells her as much, and barely gets more than the image of a shrug in response. It infuriates him - he wants, _needs_ her to argue with him. Isn’t that what the Doctor does? Believe that Gallifrey deserves to go on, that the Time Lords deserve to go on, no matter what torments they’ve forced them both to endure? No matter what _lies -_

Oh, oh but that was _close._ Dangerously close. She’s there, sitting right at the edge of his mind, waiting for him to think about what he’d discovered. 

_Clever, but not quite,_ he tells her, as he tucks that memory safely away.

She responds with mild chagrin, tinged with so much exhaustion that the Master nearly keels over himself.

 _When did you last sleep?_ he wonders. 

The Doctor is silent for a long time; enough that he would wonder if she’d cut the connection off, were it not for the quiet humming of anxiety that still lingers. And a particularly Doctor-flavored hum, at that. So that just means she’s ignoring him.

Which is perfectly fine, he thinks. He can wait her out.

In the meantime, he closes his eyes and recalls the gallery, where he’d had so many cowering before him - and, bright and shining in the middle of all his chaos, the Doctor on her knees. He remembers how she’d looked at him, flushed and irritated, and said his name. Called him -

_Master._

There she is.

He holds the memory there (the Doctor kneeling down for him, her chin tilted up, her mouth twisted and her eyes wide). He can _hear_ her heartsbeats; an echo, almost, of the drums that so plagued him, but warm and alive, and growing more frantic with every second. She doesn’t respond, but the Master can see her thoughts flitting around in the space between their minds. Her little humans are right there with her, he realizes.

How _lovely_ it will be to take her apart right in front of her little _pets_ and show them all just how their almighty Doctor bows to her Master’s hand. 

_No,_ she protests, though she makes no move to close the link. If anything, it widens. He can see _so much._ He can -

 _Oh,_ he thinks, catching a particular fleeting thought. A memory: sitting together in class, minds wide to one another, while he tormented the not-yet Doctor. Everyone around them oblivious to the sweet moans echoing between them, the silent pained whimpers, the wild cry that was for the Master’s ears alone.

And another, and another. Looking at each other through new eyes, while an endless and uninspired array of humans circled around their little game, unaware of what was going on just above their perception.

 _Did you ever wonder how we went all those years and never got caught?_ he asks her. And answers, without bothering to wait for a response: _I knew you wanted to be. So I made sure we weren’t._

 _I never wanted that,_ she protests, entirely unconvincingly. _And we_ did _get caught, once - how did that turn out, again?_

Their third wedding isn’t a memory the Master particularly wants to revisit. (The wedding night, on the other hand… After the Doctor had stopped the ceremony with a few well-placed explosives and they’d made their escape, all that adrenaline had to go _somewhere._ It had resulted in the destruction of the entire top floor of their hotel, as well as eternal banishment - not that it matters anymore, since the planet itself had been destroyed in the War.) He thinks, instead, about the last time he had seen her, just after he’d finished painting her throat with bruises. _Did they see?_ he wonders, trailing phantom fingers down the line of her neck. He can feel her shivering. _Did you display them proudly, or did you wear my scarf and wish your pets would ask you why?_

 _Neither_. She shows him herself, standing in her bedroom and looking into a mirror. She’s wearing a white jumper underneath her t-shirt, and is rolling the turtleneck up over her bruises. The long sleeves fall just a bit down her arms when she does so, and he can see the marks on her wrists. It’s all _dreadfully_ boring.

 _I don’t like you ashamed,_ he says. The memory-Doctor turns around and her eyes widen. The Master grins at her. 

“Liar.” The Doctor crosses her arms over her chest and glares at him. Her anger, her _hatred_ , is syrup-sweet on his tongue. He smiles at the creases in her forehead. “You like humiliating me too much for that.”

He reaches out and twirls a bit of her hair around his finger, just to watch her breath hitch. “And _you,_ love,” he says, pulling at threads in her mind - the dozens, _hundreds_ of times he had her _beaten,_ and her hearts raced and her skin flushed as self-loathing slipped over her like a familiar cloak. He’s always known how she _thrilled,_ but knowing is nothing like feeling it for himself. His poor, _broken_ Doctor, relishing her own defeat before she picked herself back up. How much happier would she be if she just _stayed down?_ “You _like_ being humiliated.”

“How are you here?” she asks, which as far as he’s concerned is confirmation enough.

“We’re in _your_ mind, my dear,” he says. “I’m here because you want me here.”

He feels her mind wrapping around their link, ready to snap it in half - it’d hurt, it _always_ hurts, breaking the connection like that, but they’ve both done it. Prefer it, almost, to the slow withdrawal favored by most telepaths. Punishing each other and themselves for their _weakness._ He braces himself for her to do it.

She doesn’t.

The Doctor’s entire body seems to collapse under the weight of itself and she drops down to sit on the bed.

“Have you been back?” she whispers. The Master doesn’t have to ask what she means.

“No.”

She pulls her knees in close to her chest and wraps her arms around her bare shins. It makes her look impossibly small. “I have,” she says. “A few times. I drop them off somewhere - somewhere _safe,_ tell them to explore, promise I’ll be back in an hour -”

He stares at her. “ _Why,_ in Rassilon’s thrice-cursed name, would you _possibly_ want to do that?” 

“Because you told me to!” she cries. “You said - you learned the truth when you went home. And then you said I had to learn it, too. Where else? Where else would I -”

She’s shaking. Trembling on the bed, curled in on herself, her eyes wide and haunted. _Broken_. He waits for the taste of victory to land on his tongue.

It never comes.

The ice in his stomach - in _their stomachs_ \- grows. Heavy enough, nearly, to pin him to the floor, if he were really here. He isn’t, so he crosses easily over to her and sits. The bed creaks under his weight. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

“Me too.” She gets an odd, faraway look on her face, and sighs. “And my friends just left. Got tired of talking at a ghost, I suppose.”

If he were her friend, he’d tell her to _talk_ to them. Repressing’s never done her any good.

But he isn’t her friend, is he?

So, instead, he smirks at her. “Pity. I was looking forward to doing this while they were in the room.”

“Doing what?” the Doctor asks, bewildered in a way that she probably thinks is _charmingly naive_ but, really, just makes her look _incredibly_ stupid. 

He sighs and reaches over, tugging down the high neck of her jumper and pressing a soft kiss to one of the exposed bruises. She jumps about a foot in the air and lets go of her legs to flail her arms around, nearly hitting him in the process. The Master laughs against her skin.

“Are you - is this - you just wanted to -!” she cries, and he kisses her again.

“Guilty,” he says, and fully expects her to throw him out - for _real_ , this time. But she continues to surprise him.

“You should know,” she says, turning her head so he can kiss her properly, “I’m very not in my right mind.”

He laughs and obliges her, fitting his hand around the marks on her neck and tilting her chin up. “I’ve never been in mine,” he says.

When he kisses her, it’s slow and gentle, because he knows she wants the opposite. She wants him to be cruel, and rough, and remind her of all the reasons she shouldn’t keep coming back to him. She wants him to hurt her, so she can forget, for a moment, the acrid smell of a burning empire. 

Well. There are better ways to make her forget.

“As _romantic_ as having you in your bed would be, I’d much rather see you as you are,” he says, standing up and plucking at the fantasy-memory. “Show me.”

She sighs and closes her eyes. The room melts away to show the absolutely _ridiculous_ console room of her TARDIS. Like a demented cross between a crystal cave and an actual beehive. Her taste hasn’t improved a _bit_.

(He does, however, like it a little better than that time the Doctor was literally living in a steampunk clock. That one was a _bit_ too on-the-nose.)

She’s curled up on the floor in a tangle of wires and cables, wearing a long-sleeved black jumper with the same stupid, try-hard rainbow motif as her t-shirts. As though draping herself in symbols of happiness could purge the darkness from her soul. Her neck is exposed and bare of the Master’s marks, and her eyes are sunken and bruised. Her face is pink and swollen. He crouches down next to her and rubs his thumb over her cheek.

“Do they see you, when you cry?” he asks.

The Doctor glares at him. “I haven’t been crying,” she says, batting his hand away from her face. “Don’t -”

He knocks her arm aside and grips her face, hard enough that she flinches. He ignores it; through the psychic link, he can feel the fear looping through her body and settling as arousal in her core. Just as it always has. 

“Lie to me all you like,” the Master says. “It won’t change what you feel.”

To prove his point, he closes his eyes and focuses - past this image of her, to the _real_ her - and sends a sparking wave of pressure across the Doctor’s chest.

She yelps, her entire body jerking, and he realizes he hasn’t yet touched her there - not really. He’s willing to bet _no one_ has; probably not even herself, with any intention. Which is a damn shame.

“What are you -”

“Not a fan?” he guesses, and the Doctor glares at him reproachfully - though he can also feel an edge of fear coming off of her. _Real_ fear, not the kind soaked in adrenaline and endorphins that they usually play at. Fear that even (especially?) if she says _no_ , he’ll disregard her. Which means - even if he _does,_ she won’t think to break the link. Curious.

In any case, she may have a point. It’s much better to touch her when she’s _there_ and _real._ And it’s harder, then, for her to run away from her own desires.

But that doesn’t mean he still can’t have fun. “Alright,” he says, changing tack. “I won’t touch you at all.” That gets him an irritated little wrinkle of her nose, and _honestly,_ he rather thinks she should figure out exactly what it is she wants before going along with these little trysts. “Just sit back and think of… well.”

The Master grins, vicious, and wraps his mind carefully around her fragile psyche. In the solitude of his TARDIS, his physical hand slips into his trousers.

 _Of Gallifrey_ , he thinks at her. She gasps, flashes of memory rising up between their link. The Citadel, destroyed; the land, burning; the psychic thrum of dying screams as they echo in an air laced with the remnants of ash and bone. And the Doctor’s own grief, like ice. He strokes the tips of his fingers over his cock and sighs.

 _Why -_ she starts, a half-scream. He doesn’t let her finish.

 _Feel this,_ he replies, and brings her into his own mind. She doesn’t have the _equipment_ to experience the feedback properly, but she certainly remembers it, and he feels her shudder with the sensation. It must be odd, he thinks. Like a phantom limb. 

The Master works himself slowly, letting her feel all of it. For a long moment, it’s just that - the beating of their hearts, their breaths in each others’ minds, the Master’s pleasure and the Doctor’s anguish looping between them.

 _How does it feel?_ he asks. He can sense her trembling, fighting against the things he’s forcing her to feel. Her nails digging into her palms, as if pain ever did more than _enhance_ the pleasure, for either of them. _What are you so scared of?_

Silence. And then - rage, pure and glorious, pours from her, and he sees the _truth_ of her grief. Of her _guilt._

 _They deserved it_ . It’s not quite a thought - not a spoken one, anyway. Just a feeling. She doesn’t yet know - but then again, that’s not true, is it? She doesn’t know _this_ reason, but that doesn’t mean she’s blind to all the thousands of _other_ reasons Gallifrey deserved to burn. She mourns for the innocents, the children, but the Time Lords themselves -

 _You’re relieved,_ he thinks at her, rubbing his thumb over the head of his cock. She twitches, and he can feel how his touch throbs in her clit. Remembers, too, how sensitive he was there, when he had one. _They can’t hurt you if they’re all gone_.

 _No,_ she replies. _Just you._

 _Quite._ He laughs and speeds up his hand, working himself hard and fast. His fist is tight, and it makes him wonder, idly, how she’d feel around him. _As it should be_.

She catches the thought and holds it close; she’s focusing on the sensation in his hand, the tingling nerves in his palm as his cock slides over skin, and he can feel the envy coming off of her in waves. She keeps clenching down on nothing, shockingly and painfully empty, and he grins wide in the space between their minds.

 _Aw,_ he says. _Do you want me to fuck you, love?_

 _Don’t be crass_ , she gasps, and the Master chuckles. All these centuries, all this time - all the things they’ve done together, and she’s still a right prude.

 _Fine,_ he thinks at her, his hips jerking up a little as he thrusts into his hand. _Would you prefer I say ‘make love’?_

Her disgust comes in the form of a sharp jolt of reproach, which goes directly to his cock and back to her, and he hears her crying out. She’s getting off on her own disapproval, her own hatred, and it tastes like a sun spun of pure sugar. He lets it bounce between them a few more times, the Doctor’s indignant righteousness like a spark under both their skins.

The Master comes first, spilling over his hand; he can feel the Doctor is close, whimpering little moans in his head - she just needs a little push -

He breaks the connection.

* *

_Contact._

_Contact._

_What was that?_ the Doctor rages. Her head is pounding, her limbs are sore, and her pants are soaked through to her trousers. She’s on the floor of her TARDIS console room, and she’s a _mess._ She only hopes none of her mates have wandered back in while she was - occupied.

 _Did you come?_ the Master asks. His tone is - she can’t tell. Curious, but not kind. His question is a command. She can feel her face growing red, a blush high on her cheekbones, as she ducks her head and stares at her hands. Fingers twisting together on her lap.

She nods, before remembering that he can’t see her in this new link. _Yes,_ she admits.

 _Good girl_.

And then he’s gone, and she’s left alone with nothing but her guilt for company.

**Author's Note:**

> at some point they're either going to stop making bad decisions or take their clothes off.


End file.
